East meets West this fall at Crisp-Ellert Museum

Sunday

The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College will kick off its 2018-2019 season with the exhibit, “Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here.”

The exhibition will be displayed through Oct. 27, with an artist talk on Friday in conjunction with the First Friday Art Walk.

Artist Jiha Moon harvests cultural elements native to Korea, Japan and China and unites them with Western elements to investigate the multi-faceted nature of our current global identity as influenced by popular culture, technology, racial perceptions and folklore.She was born in Daegu, Korea, and is now based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Featuring more than 50 works including painting, ceramics and installation, Moon blurs the lines between Western and Eastern identified iconography, such as the characters from the online game Angry Birds and smart phone Emojis, which float alongside Asian tigers and Indian gods in compositions that simultaneously appear both familiar and foreign.

Moon asks the question, “Why do people love foreign stuff so much?” Her witty and ironic work explores how Westerners perceive other cultures and how perceived foreigners see the West.

“When we travel to other countries, explore different cultures and meet with new people, we tend to fall in love with things that are not our own,” Moon said. “People have a soft spot for foreign things. The world is so interconnected nowadays, how can you even tell where someone or something ‘comes from’ anymore?”

In her work, Moon acts in the role of a traveler and explores the notion that identity is not beholden to geographic location.

Honoring traditional Asian arts through her use of Hanji paper, Korean silk and calligraphic brushstrokes, throughout the exhibition she plays with iconography and symbols that have been classified as “foreign,” such as blue willow china patterns, fortune cookies (which originated in California but are identified as Chinese), Korean fans and floating dragons. She intermingles them with references to pop and Southern folk art.

At first glance, Moon’s work appears as a mash-up of high-and-low brow cultural references. Upon further inspection, slyly ironic and humorous references emerge that are satirically filtered by the artist, who reminds us that our preconceived notion of “others” is not a true manifestation of actual identity.

“Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here” is organized by the Taubman Museum of Art in collaboration with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston School of the Arts in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition is curated by Amy G. Moorefield, deputy director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Taubman Museum of Art, and Mark Sloan, director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art.

The event is free and open to the public. The artist talk is at 4 p.m., followed by an opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m. in conjunction with the Friday Art Walk.

The Crisp Ellert Art Museum is located at 48 Sevilla St.

For information, call Julie Dickover at 904-826-8530 or email crispellert@flagler.edu.

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